This week we had Korean visitors from SAIT, the CTO Office of Samsung, keen to engage with partners here in the Cambridge high-technology cluster. They ran a big event here last Autumn alongside established local partners such as ARM, Nokia, CSR, and the University of Cambridge. I was pleased to see their European technology scouts back again at the Philips Open Innovation event last December. It was great to learn that they have since had return visitors down to their base in South East England and started open innovation discussions. They're sending two different scouts to our Corporate Gateway next month, one identifying company partners for key technologies they need for today's products, the other academic candidates for R&D grants. We'll be short-listing potential partners for them in their areas of interest and setting up one-to-one meetings over a couple of days, and they'll also meet members at an Open event and sit down for dinner with Founder Members and Founders. Walking around West Cambridge site in a spell of blustery sunshine and watching them note the embedded labs and spin-outs clearly illustrated the international reach of the ideas here.
Later that day, I met with a local entrepreneur keen to explore sources of funding to get her prototype into production. She has a pending order from a big retailer, and she's won local competitions but she needs to build something they could start selling. She has the option to teach at Hong Kong Polytecnic University, whose Dean and heads of school visited last week to learn more about how our cluster works, and we discussed how it would be to start her business from there instead. Somewhere in the world, she wants her idea to come through to market.
From both ends of the scale, businesses find academic collaborators, investors and other businesses from around the world in Cambridge. It is good to be there at the finding.
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